Click on any of the images for the full-sized picture.

23-Aug-2012 -- The confluence is on a lake in an extremly beautiful area of the Arctic. We were doing a lake survey in the area and had the rarely-used equipment of floats on our helicopter. So we could actually visit this remote and practically isolated spot by landing on the water.

We visited about 550 lakes in 3 weeks, landed over the deepest spots (which is easy to see from the air due to their clarity) and took water and sediment samples to be analyzed for metals. The hope is to find hints towards exploitable ore deposits.

The immediate area is actually quite hilly, almost mountainous. There is no way to ever get there by land unless you want to hike+climb for weeks and the next humans may be found in tents in exploration camps still more than 70km away.

My lens was fairly wide-angle, therefore the surrounding outcrops don't look as big and steep as they are.

The lakes in the area are the clearest in the world. We did water measurements and some have a conductivity of 0 or 1µS - that is less than distilled water. The water is incredibly clear and you can see easily 30m deep to the lake bottom. Every lake has it's own color and they vary from all kinds of shades of blue to green.